The long winter sports season can be difficult and tiring. For student athletes who participate in both spring and winter sports, the quick transition between the two can be challenging. It can be hard for athletes to quickly shift their schedule from one season to another, and the lack of an offseason can be a challenge for multisport athletes.

Sophomore Jack Beffel plays basketball during the winter and baseball in the spring. “It can be hard to focus my time on both. During one season you really have to dedicate more time to that,” he says. This is difficult because, in baseball, the offseason training takes place during the winter sports season. He wishes that, “there was more time in between so I could just focus on school a little and also to re-acclimate to the other sport.” Beffel represents the difficulties of the quick, challenging transition from winter to spring sports.

Junior Alex Cox has had a somewhat similar experience as Beffel, playing both a spring and a winter sport. He participates in wrestling in the winter and baseball in the spring. Like Beffel, Cox wishes there was more time between seasons in order to “warm up for tryouts for the spring sport.” However, he is able to shift between sports in the short amount of time by mentally separating the seasons. Keeping the wrestling and baseball season clearly separate is one way that Cox deals with the quick shift between winter and spring sports.

Not every student athlete experiences the same challenges when transitioning between sports seasons. While sophomore basketball and track athlete Aleah Huse mentions that she would like more time between the winter and spring sports season, but she also says that it is somewhat easier for her transition into track season from basketball. “I’m already partly in shape,” Huse says. Finally, Huse mentions that track is not a difficult sport to shift into because “track is mostly just running in a straight line.”  Huse doesn’t experience the same difficulties as Beffel and Cox when it comes to progressing from winter to spring sports, mostly because her second sport is somewhat built into her first one.

The combination of winter and spring sports back to back can take a toll on student athletes. The toughness of athletes such as Beffel, Cox, and Huse are displayed in the hard work and challenges they go through in order to participate in the sports they love. While all student athletes experience the time between sports differently, it is clear that it can be a challenge. All three of the students agreed that there should be more time in between seasons. The first baseball game is on March 27th, and the competitive track season begins on April 10th.